Relationship 101

In terms of relationships, a topic that is often discussed is cheating. Men talk about the consequences of cheating, times that they were involved with a girl who was cheating on her boyfriend or husband, or methods of preventing their girl from cheating to begin with.

But a potential relationship-destroying force that is often overlooked in the rhetoric of men is the emotional affair.

Emotional affairs can be just as detrimental to your happiness and stability in a relationship as sexual ones can be.

So today I’m going to talk about the events and signs that often lead to an emotional affair and what you can do as a man to try to ensure that you don’t end up in this position.

If you are like most guys you probably have thought at one point or another that attraction is like a switch, and once it switches on it is on forever. But what might surprise you is that the reality is totally counter to your expectations.

The startling truth is that a woman’s need for you to keep her attracted is actually very similar to a thirst, and she needs it refilled every time you interact with her (not just once). If you are clever you will realise that the best long term plan – just like a thirst – will require a well to be dug and water to be pumped and delivered on a consistent basis.

Don’t let this image scare you however, I just mean to imply that attraction has to become a consistent thing that you uphold with actions every day rather than an objective you meet once and are done with.

Conventional wisdom states that once you “ask her out”, “marry her”, or get an “in for sex” that it is game set and match, but this is just simply false, and girls will ALWAYS change their minds unless you are consistently attractive. If you have a mindset that runs off the belief that you only need her approval ONCE, throw it out the window and change your view immediately.

In essence, women are much like any other thing worth getting right in life, they take passion and a great work ethic to do right, and once you adopt that “work ethic” you can consistently rebuild and maintain attraction all day long. So if you want to never have to guess again at IF she likes you, you have to set your mind to changing your expectations and go from a “set and forget” guy, to a guy that applies himself consistently.

I’m going to wade back into theory on this one, a la “Picking Up Girls and the Game of Asymmetric Returns.” Only this time, we’ll be looking at the end game of picking up, instead of the middle game. Worth noting that some of the examples in this article are as well inspired by Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness – very good book.

Riz asks a few questions in the article on office politics about “settling down”:

“This leads me to my question(s)

1) Do successful seducers who see beyond classic dating ‘settle down’ ? – Thinking about it, why would they – They know that whichever girl they are with right now, there is probably out there somewhere, a girl who is even sexier, more intelligent, more fun, successful etc etc – They know they will never find Ms.Perfect – So why ‘settle’ – Whats the point?

Surely on of the big reasons most guys settle is because they fall in love with a girl and can’t help but cling onto her in false belief that they will never find another girl like her, they have to marry her now to solidify heir destined relationship and if things ever go wrong and they divorce then that’s it, life over.

2) What are your thoughts specifically on ‘settling down’ – I don’t know why exactly but even uttering those words ‘settle down’ sounds to me like giving up almost. To me it just sounds so defeatist. Why would anybody want to settle down lol, its crazy.

And I am not a young man either, I have though this for quite a while. Seems hardly anybody else really relates though.

It’s like for most, settling down is the ultimate goal to achieve in life. Everyone always talks about it in group ‘ah so are you settled yet?’ – And i’m like ‘uhh no...., should I?’”

These are good questions, yeah. Personally, I’ve never had a problem with the idea of long-term relationships and children, but the concept of “settling down” has always bugged me to high heaven... since I was a small boy, in fact.

There’s just something about how most “ordinary” folks define “settling down” as something that sounds, to someone like me, and Riz too by the sound of it, like “giving up on your dreams.”

It’s like saying “I’ve done all that I’m going to do; now it’s time to ‘get serious’ and go get a wife and a house with a white picket fence and go be a wage slave for the next 30 or 40 years so I can afford to pay off the mortgage on my McMansion and fleet of minivans, then die.”

When you’re someone who wants to do more with his life than the ordinary, you’ll tend to be quite allergic to the idea of settling down.

Yet, as alluring as the idea of bouncing around from one woman to the next until the end of time can seem, almost nobody does it... including all the men who assure you in their teens, twenties, and early thirties that they, definitely will stay single forever.

Why is that – why does almost everybody (including the folks who claim not to want to) eventually end up “settling down”?

Well, it’s all down to a little term called “satisficing.”

“I am in love – should I make her my girlfriend?”

I have, on multiple occasions, including in the comment sections here at Girls Chase, been asked such a question.

We humans can bond with one another emotionally and experience a stream of emotion that is very intense. We often refer to that experience as love, and, as we know, love is a strong thing.

As you meet women, you will probably meet some you truly like – i.e., some who you would maybe even say you’ve fallen for.

After a while, you pretty much decide to stop doing cold approaches and instead aim to get that one particular girl as your girlfriend.

Such a thing happens to most of us, including Chase and I. I will, in this post, share my opinions on this topic. But keep in mind that you know best what is best for you, and if you believe that trying to get this particular girl to become you girlfriend, no matter what, is an ideal thing for you to do, then you must do whatever floats your boat.

Back in late 2006 and early 2007, I was on an invitation-only social networking site called Late Night Shots. It was a site that allowed those on the Washington, D.C. social scene to “see and be seen” by others – set up profiles, find out where everyone was gathering at, and the like. Sort of a private Facebook for the D.C. socialite crowd.

One of the more interesting features of LNS then was an anonymous message board where people could ask all sorts of dicey questions and give all manner of unbiased, unfiltered replies, since their answers were in no way tied to their profiles or real world identities.

I wasn’t terribly interested in the gossip section of those boards (”Who’s dating whom in the scene?” “What new girl has rocketed to the top of the scene the fastest?”), although it did make for good occasional reading on how different people evaluated social status competitors in the scene (and worked to build up their and others’ reputations, or tear others down through rumors). What interested me more were the various relationship topics that got posed and debated to death.

One of the most frequent of these was the question of “Do women’s pasts matter?”

While nearly all of the female commenters seemed to argue quite vehemently that they didn’t matter one bit, the male commenters were divided right down the middle in their positions: half that they did, half that they didn’t.

Among the half arguing that they didn’t, there was a further divide: the men who didn’t care about women’s pasts because they had no intention of ever ending up in any form of committed long-term relationship... and the men who didn’t care because they legitimately thought a woman’s past had no bearing on her future.

I’d argue that the past matters even in a fling, hookup, or a casual or open relationship... simply because crazy girls can wreck your life in all kinds of terrible ways even when you’re keeping things arms-length with them, and a one-night stand with the wrong kind of girl can quickly turn down Bad News Lane if she fixates on you or brings other bad stuff into your sphere. But what about commitment? How much a woman’s past matter if you want something serious?

As a student of psychology who worked in the field for years, I have arrived at the belief that the single most important predictor of behavior is context. By this, I mean the immediate environment surrounding the behavior – the people, the atmosphere, and all sensory input streams.

I mean, think about it for a second. Doesn’t it sometimes seem like you have a different personality depending on who you’re with, what you’re doing, or where you are? Have you ever done something, then looked back at it later and thought, “That just wasn’t me! I never do stuff like that!”

It’s almost like there was someone else controlling your actions, because the truth of the matter is that... it was a different personality. It was just as much “you” as the “you” you like to think is “you”, but it was simply expressing a side of itself that you had never experienced before. And, if I had to guess, I’d say you were in some kind of special circumstance when that happened… weren’t you? Maybe you were on vacation, maybe you were intoxicated, maybe you were hanging out with people with whom... for some reason, in that instance, it just seemed like an okay thing to do. Right?

So, as with nearly all phenomena I encounter in my journeys and adventures, I asked myself the question... “How can I use what I’ve learned to improve my sex life and the sex lives of my special lady friends?”

Growing up, I was shown again and again in film, books, and television that there was precisely one (1) path a man could follow with women, romantically-speaking: date a few people, find the right girl, and settle down.

This never sat entirely right with me, because while I enjoyed the idea of pairing up intensely with some amazing woman, my tastes also changed enough that I also enjoyed fantasizing about pairing up with lots of different amazing women. Not all at once (what a headache!), but mostly more or less one after another. Maybe having children with the different various amazing women along the way. Even while fixated on that one special girl, I could never imagine more than a year or two out into a relationship with her... sort of like most Hollywood films. The movie in my head always ended after the exciting part.

When I discovered the seduction community, I found two more beliefs about how relationships could go, coexisting rather uncomfortably side-by-side with that first. Plenty of men learning how to get girls still aimed for a settled life with one girl they’d commit to more or less forever; some of them because of a lack of abundance mentality, but many of them because that was just what they really wanted, and the cultural narrative gelled with their own intrinsic desires.

Those other two views on relationships are the ones I want to discuss today. I won’t go much into the conventional mainstream view of relationships – you already know that one plenty well enough (and, for the record, I think it’s a perfectly fine and doable path for those who want it), so instead, I want to talk about the other two:

1. The “Committed Relationships are Bad for Men” View, and
2. The “Committed Relationships are Playgrounds for Men” View

... and I’ll also talk about where both of these views come from, and how and why your lifestyle radically colors your perception of relationships.